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Model-based fault detection in context-aware adaptive applications

Published:09 November 2008Publication History

ABSTRACT

Applications running on mobile devices are heavily context-aware and adaptive, leading to new analysis and testing challenges as streams of context values drive these applications to undesired configurations that are not easily exposed by existing validation techniques. We address this challenge by employing a finite-state model of adaptive behavior to enable the detection of faults caused by (1) erroneous adaptation logic, and (2) asynchronous updating of context information, which leads to inconsistencies between the external physical context and its internal representation within an application. We identify a number of adaptation fault patterns, each describing a class of faulty behaviors that we detect automatically by analyzing the system's adaptation model. We illustrate our approach on a simple but realistic application in which a cellphone's configuration profile is changed automatically based on the user's location, speed and surrounding environment.

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                    cover image ACM Conferences
                    SIGSOFT '08/FSE-16: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of software engineering
                    November 2008
                    369 pages
                    ISBN:9781595939951
                    DOI:10.1145/1453101

                    Copyright © 2008 ACM

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                    Publication History

                    • Published: 9 November 2008

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